Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Read online

  It was just the sort of grey-area pursuit that they should have been expecting from the outset – and indeed, that Barducci had been preparing for. It was just a little unexpected in the uncharted depths of interstellar space when you dropped out of the grey to … do whatever it was their inestimable Captain – and inestimable, on so many levels, was the right word for him – had been planning here, with this ill-fated Fergunakil clipper.

  Sadly, this meant there would be no leaving this volume of space for the unfortunate Captain Nak Dool and his people. No spreading the word. It was them, or the crew of the A-Mod 400 and probable war between the throne and AstroCorps, and Drago was pretty sure that meant it was going to be them.

  Barducci was still moodily stirring these thoughts – and still running full-tilt through the maintenance tunnel – when Commander Choya Alapitarius W’Tan turned their ship’s big guns on the Black Honey Wings, and the docking spar erupted behind him in a whispering thunder of Godfire and rushing atmosphere.

  XII

  An explosion that opened a ship or hab to vacuum made a strange sound. There was still atmosphere in one part – the part where the owner of the ears was, if he was lucky – so sound waves still travelled through the air and became sounds in said ears. But the other half of the explosion was going out into space and making no sound waves. And while that shouldn’t, logically, make any difference to the quality of the fuckamighty boom one’s ears heard when one was partaking in such an explosion … well, it did. It just did.

  The detonation as the A-Mod 400’s mini-whorl guns ripped into the docking spar separating the Nope, Leftovers from the rest of the Black Honey Wings was a sort of flat, hollow whunk noise. The breathless howl of the Godfire that momentarily preceded it and the roar of escaping air following it did nothing to change the weirdness of the actual detonation. Drago’s brain insisted it was a thunderous explosion, but his eardrums were unconvinced.

  It wasn’t something he had a lot of cause to muse over, however. He only just had time to hurl himself forward and grab the edge of a support strut before the deadly blast of outrushing air dragged him horizontal. Fortunately, this lasted for approximately one-tenth of a second and his fingers held out for two-tenths of a second, and the nearest emergency seal – some twenty feet behind him – slammed into place before he fell, gasping, to the floor.

  The damage to the Black Honey Wings, and the fact that he had survived it, removed some of the urgency from his headlong charge through the ship. The damage was now done and the crew in the main body of the Black Honey Wings would assume that all their enemies were either on the Nope, Leftovers or back on their own modular. None of them had been in the main ship, and depending on the surveillance Dool had set up throughout his vessel it seemed unlikely that anyone would be aware of Barducci’s movements leading up to the explosion, although they might have been aware he’d left the dome. And now the docked modulars were severed entirely.

  Drago got his breath back, regained his feet, and began to make his way slightly more carefully through the dark, alarm-caterwauling backstage areas of the Black Honey Wings.

  “Main hold,” he muttered to himself. “Main hold…” I suppose a map with ‘YOU ARE HERE’ on it would be too much to ask for.

  Still, he’d been on a few Chrysanthemums and more complicated custom-starships built onto a Chrys foundation, and this left him with a reasonably good idea of where he needed to go. And he could go most of the way in the maintenance tunnels, which was helpful. By the time he arrived, the alarms had been replaced by a less-jarring general alert tone and the running and shouting in the corridors had given way to silence, punctuated by the occasional purposeful hum of a repair drone or janitorial. Whatever was going on with the modulars, it didn’t seem as though all-out space battle had yet been joined. Not so it was noticeable here, anyway.

  He emerged in front of the main hold’s access doors to find someone blocking his path. And not just any someone.

  “Ahh, shit,” he said.

  XIII

  Noro Metak buccaneers, according to the general rules of the goodwill ambassador exchange program, were not permitted command positions on starships over a certain size and armament grade. There were all sorts of rules, most of them imposed by the various Noro nations. The authorities of AstroCorps, the Fleet and the Six Species as a whole tended to be a bit more lax, and this was why you ended up with cases like the unfortunate Captain Dool.

  It was always interesting, although Drago didn’t often have a chance to talk about it with anybody, when a dumbler species found themselves confronted by a big bad galaxy full of aliens. From the Fleet’s first intimidating “be quiet or they’ll hear you” hail, to Çrom Skelliglyph asking what sort of booze was recommended for washing the taste of cud out of your mouth … it was an adjustment, no question.

  And the Noro Metak had handled it well. They were blessed with a resource-rich homeworld and still more resource-rich planets in their system, and biology naturally exempt from most of the big conflict-causers. Yes, they were ferocious for herbivores. And yes, their world had been a bit of a hodgepodge of different interest groups and cultures. Encountering aliens didn’t actually unite a dumbler planet into a single homogenous unit with a centralised world government. Not overnight, anyway, despite the way it logically seemed inevitable. Every little group needed their own first contact with the aliens, and had their own ideas of how it was going to proceed from there. There had been big nations and small ones, but the big ones were always insistent that they weren’t trying to take charge, and the small ones were always shouting that the big ones were trying to take charge. That’s why the diplomats and policy-writers were paid so much, metaphorically speaking. Before too long, they’d gotten it all nailed down.

  The Noro Metak had settled back into their own solar system, where they were likely to survive quite comfortably for another ten million years if they happened to last that long without blowing each other up. A little bit of perspective never hurt, and they did have the option for expansion to nearby systems if – for example – their sun burned out. Perspective brought long-term thinking with it, but in the end life went on and pragmatism regained its pre-eminence as a cultural driver. The Noros had withdrawn, the Six Species had wished them well, and now the only Noro Metak contact with the outside galaxy was the one- and two-person buccaneer crews. And although Dool had gone ‘off-script’ here, the general rule held.

  One- and two-person crews.

  Drago looked at the massive Noro standing between him and the main hold’s access doors. It looked an awful lot like Dool – aliens all looked sort of the same, this was just a fact of evolution and not something you could afford to feel too guilty about – but it was bigger.

  She was bigger, Barducci realised. This one was female, and she was stupendous. Was she Dool’s wife? Mate? Relative of some sort? Or just his bucky crewmate?

  Not really any way to tell.

  “I ought to warn you–” Drago started.

  The Noro roared, lowered her huge head, and charged.

  “Hell,” Drago muttered, and braced himself as seven hundred pounds of enraged beef crashed down the corridor towards him.

  XIV

  Barducci had time to wonder, as the enormous Noro Metak female thundered towards him, whether Dool had gone off-script enough to have more than one Noro crewmate. It didn’t really matter, of course, because a Noro Metak wasn’t much bigger or nastier than a big, nasty human. They certainly weren’t as dangerous as Molranoids, all things considered. If there were more of them on the ship, it’d be better than having Molren, Blaren or Bonshooni on board. Drago knew what he’d rather fight. What it might mean about the efficacy of the Noro Metak goodwill ambassador program, or the level of meddling and preferential interference taking place at the hands of agencies like the Halfmoon throne, was another matter … but not one he had the opportunity to worry about now.

  He did have time to consider, fleetingly, the possibility that Doo
l might have sent him to the hold on purpose, knowing his fellow buccaneer was in the area. Maybe what Barducci was looking for wasn’t here at all.

  But he was out of time to worry about it. The Noro reached him at avalanche speed, and the quarters were too close for him to avoid her entirely. So he rode the charge, ducking to one side and throwing himself backwards to lessen the impact. The great horned head – tighter and smaller than the sweeping longhorns of Captain Dool, but thicker and heavier too – missed his face but the armoured shoulder caught him a glancing blow. It was enough to hurl him against the wall, grinding something in his own shoulder but not breaking anything.

  He scrabbled for his gun as the Noro broke her charge and rounded on him with a crash of boots. Then he realised he wasn’t carrying a gun, and spent a valuable half-second calling himself names. Had he even taken one from the Nope, Leftovers? Surely he would have. Had he tucked it into his belt and then lost it diving through the exchange?

  Shit, if he’d lost his gun on an exchange dive, he deserved to get creamed. He was losing his -

  He vaulted to his feet and turned to face the Noro Metak.

  Then he realised that she had a gun.

  He wondered if he had another half-second to spare for more name-calling. It seemed like something he should do.

  XV

  The Noro Metak bared her huge square teeth and rumbled menacingly as she levelled the gun at Barducci. It was, he noted with detachment, actually some sort of incendiary cutter used for mining. It had been adapted from over-the-shoulder human usage and fitted with a couple of other attachments, and it probably weighed in excess of sixty pounds. The Noro held it one-handed without apparent effort, although he could imagine her bulging muscles under the body-armour-slash-uniform.

  “You are a huge human,” she said, in an oddly congenial tone.

  “I get that a lot,” Drago admitted, keeping his stance relaxed and his hands in sight. She hadn’t shot him yet, which meant … well, it meant absolutely nothing. She still might render him down to ash in the next five seconds, or she might want to gloat or sling insults for the time it took for him to get within grabbing distance of the gun. Or, perhaps the better option, within diving distance of the cargo bay doors.

  If the cargo bay doors happened to be open. Which they weren’t, his peripheral vision reported.

  In the meantime, she still hadn’t shot him, and every passing second increased the chances of the A-Mod 400 landing a hit on the larger vessel that just might rock her exchange compensators and allow him to get the jump on his adversary.

  “If you give us convict,” she said, “we let the rest of you go.”

  “I think that deal is off the table,” Drago said regretfully. “Did you know your … Captain … fed us the person we were out here to meet?”

  The Noro snarled again. “Fergunakil is not person.”

  “Well, I guess you’ve got me there,” Drago admitted, “but in purely legal terms, it sort of was.”

  “If you eat meat, you have to decide where is line between beast-meat and person-meat.”

  “You seemed to want to distinguish people from non-people not ten seconds ago.”

  “For me, line is not what I use to decide what to eat.”

  “Are we really having a herbivore/omnivore debate?” Drago asked, genuinely curious. It was one of the more surreal conversations he’d had at gunpoint, and that was a list that included some absolute doozies. “I’ll freely admit, I often have to consciously ignore the fact that some of my food once had big dewy eyes and was loved unconditionally by its mother. I guess that’s why we have that distinction between intelligent animal and sentient person, and declare that the mother-infant bond is just a next-generational protective instinct in the former.”

  Her large, mottled-hide face betrayed surprise. “You are huge and talking-lots human,” she noted. “Do you get that a lot too?”

  “Yes,” Drago admitted. “Would you feel better if we were simply consistent across the board, and ate everything?”

  The Noro shrugged a vast, sloping shoulder. Just for a moment, the massive dented barrel of the mining burner wavered, up and to the left. Drago launched himself forward and to the side, batting the barrel – not up, but down, helping as she over-corrected and fired at the same time. The outermost extremity of the invisible ray scorched his hip, and the barrel burned his palm before he could spin away. Not allowing himself to feel the pain he slapped his other palm, fingers loose but with the full force of his arm behind the blow, against the Noro’s head just below the horns. She stumbled, and Drago side-stepped and tripped her directly into the lurid yellow-white line of slagged metal the gun had scrawled in the deck plating.

  She didn’t pass out from the blow, which was unfortunate, and she didn’t die immediately from the heat, which was more unfortunate still. She did, however, fall with the gun in front of her and that also went into the molten metal. It was designed – far better than a Noro Metak was, anyway – to withstand a bit of high-intensity heat and a modest amount of slag-spatter, but it had also been customised for one-hand use. The trigger casing burned and ran against the Noro’s charred fist, and a too-long moment of piercing shrieks later the gun’s reactor lost containment. The half of the Noro Metak that had face-planted in the molten metal exploded with a nasty scattering of armour and hot offal, and the rest of her shielded Drago from the blast.

  “Damn it all,” Barducci muttered, not looking too closely through the smoke at the sizzling mess. Part of him was convinced that a Noro Metak female that size might have been pregnant, or calving, or whatever you were meant to call it. He seemed to recall some discussion about it when AstroCorps and the Noro Metak had first met. Something about the females only growing horns when they were pregnant? Or was it only losing their horns when they were pregnant?

  Well, whatever it happened to be, all the other parts of him decided he didn’t want to know. So he didn’t look down at the charred remains as he skirted them and slapped the main hold’s access doors open.

  XVI

  The ship, a battered gunmetal-grey tube like a huge torpedo, lay along one wall of the cargo hold, canted slightly onto her side with her underbelly unceremoniously cut open. The damage was oddly apropos, considering that the vessel fit her pilot rather snugly with only minimal drive, weapons, comms and life-support machinery around the outside. She was a blunt-ended cylinder designed to contain a single Fergunakil, take it from place to place as fast as possible, and keep it alive – a suit, really, more than a starship.

  The clipper was an extension of a great fish, and she had been gutted and discarded like a fish.

  Even though things were dry and relatively tidy, the fight clearly having taken place some length of time previously, the whole spacious main hold still stank of brine and the assortment of rotting matter that usually graced the interior of a Fergunakil clipper. The cybernetic implants and leads and interfaces that connected the shark to the vessel surrounding it had been ripped out in the course of the removal of the pilot, in many cases – Drago saw as he took a deep breath and ducked his head into the burned opening – leaving clumps of soft grey meat around them. He withdrew, stood back, and breathed again.

  “Ah Ildar, I love my job,” he muttered.

  Captain Dool’s crew had clearly also removed a lot of the more valuable components from the clipper – just because you’d been sent on a bounty hunting mission, that was no reason to pass up an opportunity for a little side-profit – and left her more or less disassembled even though at a cursory examination she seemed to be in one piece. Aside from the big hole in the belly, at least.

  This was both good news and bad news. Drago could have told them that attacking and scavenging a Fergie ship was a damn fool thing to do, and attempting to sell the parts on was even worse. Even if it was out in the middle of nowhere, alone, a Fergunakil was almost certain to be part of a school. And even if the other members of that school didn’t actually like that lone Fergunakil v
ery much, they would come for anyone who attacked it.

  Fergies held grudges. This was a well-known fact … but the true, crazy extent of the fact was invariably something people failed to appreciate. If you were going to attack a Fergunakil ship, you were better off leaving her dead in space with as little identifying weapons-signatures as possible. Ideally, you’d blast her into her nasty component atoms and make yourself scarce.

  But it wasn’t Drago’s job to tell them that. Nak Dool should have had some more experienced space-dogs on his crew to educate him about this stuff.

  Anyway, the ship was stripped, and that was both good news and bad news. It was bad news because Barducci had been considering the clipper as a last-ditch escape option if the fight got too hot on board the Black Honey Wings. It was good news for much the same reason – piloting a Fergie ship was a revolting concept at best, and was way too dependent on hacking the cybernetic connections and mastering mechanical controls intended for use by the cartilaginous proto-hands of a fifty-foot shark. It was theoretically possible, but the best you could expect was a barely-controlled freefall until somebody could pick you up and pry you out of there and spray you with deodorant. You wanted to be absolutely out of alternatives, anyway.

  He took another deep breath, and went delving for the computer core.

  XVII

  It ended up taking him a couple of minutes, and even Barducci’s lung capacity wasn’t that great. He was forced to take a few shallow, retch-inducing breaths inside the clipper before rolling out of the hole the bounty hunters had cut in her belly. He had the main computer core, a sodden cylinder like a big uncooked sausage, stuffed into the back of his belt because he was damned if he was going to face any of his team – let alone his intrepid Captain – with it stuffed into the front.